During my third week in Singapore, I became intimately acquainted with the unglamorous aspects of charity work. In our office, there is a storage room crammed with the fruits of seasons of prior donation drives; it was my job that week to sort through the inventory and distinguish between the usable, unusable, and repurpose-able.
The truth with running any charity or nonprofit is that the most useful donation is always money. However, most donors dislike donating simple money, because it feels to them like they are buying something and getting nothing. They would prefer to ask us what we need, and then buy the thing themselves to give to us. I think inherent within this position is skepticism of any organization putting the money to legitimate use. With the amount of scammers out there in the world, I don't exactly blame them, but we can't pay our teachers and rents with packs of Spiderman colored pencils.
Donations other than money might be of temporary or situational use, but its fundamental illiquidity is a pain to deal with, especially for organizations operating in metropolitan areas with expensive rent and limited storage. As such, the situation here has gotten to a point of overflow that needed to be resolved: Things must either be given away, sold, or binned as rubbish. Sometimes people don't pay much attention to what they are donating to: Sorting through books, I found three sets of Chinese-language books, even though we strictly teach English phonics at Curious Thoughts. Mismatched sets of pencil cases, used erasers—sometimes, people will use donation bins as an excuse to get rid of their own junk.
The bin in the middle of the photograph is one that I had finished sorting. It contains stationary and other supplies that can be donated to our beneficiaries. Other things that were mismatched, or things that were of high value but insufficient quantity to distribute to an entire class, I put in a separate box, later to be sold at a fundraising junk sale booth.
We run a pop-up booth about once or twice a month, during our Saturday lessons. Parents and their kids volunteer to run these, both as an exercise in entrepreneurship and a way to give back to their community. This week, we sold popcorn: it was quite a pop-ular booth!
Still, the charity branch of Curious Thoughts is running at a deficit. We rely mostly on grant money, and in recent years the grants have been mercurial and inconsistent. One year, we'll net $24,000 in grants; some other years might yield only $3,500, barely enough to cover operational expenses for two months of programming. One of my most important duties this summer is to come up with sustainable fundraising ideas and hopefully create a healthy pipeline of donations through diversified revenue streams that make us less reliant on annual grants. To that end, we're looking at more government sponsorship and attaining IPC status, corporate partnerships, and annual events with large community partners such as the National Library system.
I'll be honest: I dislike this part of the work. I'd much rather be in the classroom, working with the kids, than sifting through dusty storage bins full of mildewed books and stationary. I don't particularly enjoy sending emails and drafting one-pagers and making slides with tiers donation packages; it makes me feel beggar-ish. I feel like this part of nonprofit work is one made from pure resilience: How can I be persistently annoying enough that corporations will decide to meet their CSR benchmarks by giving us money, instead of some other charity? How can I entice them with tax write-offs? It's enough to make you feel small and insufficient, like a mosquito trying to bleed a boulder.
I push through by thinking about why I do this work in the first place, why I care so much about early childhood literacy and education access for underprivileged kids. Recently, I read a poem by Barbara Kingsolver, titled "Cage of Heaven," excerpted below:
I have what she had: fleets
of ships in our libraries to take us anywhere;
some goodly sort of god arranging his furniture
in our houses, that we might try out heaven;
and poetry's clear pools where the lone swimmer
can feel against bare skin the ice of revelation.
To enjoy the solitary act of reading that nevertheless connects one to some greater spiritual web; to understand that someone else has tread this ground before—the gift that education makes possible to find oneself. This is a gift that should be granted to anyone willing to accept it. I hope that, in what I believe will be the post-information age to come—when the adoption of AI has made it possible for people to live their entire lives wholly uncurious about the world around them—literacy will never again be taken for granted.